This invention relates to printing on so-called smartcards and similarly dimensioned articles and in particular to apparatus enabling a printing device of a postage meter to print an imprint on a smartcard or the like.
Potage meters include printing means for printing a postage indicium on a mail piece. The postage indicium provides evidence that accounting has been effected in respect of a postage charge to be applied to the mail piece. The printing means includes feed rollers operative to feed mail pieces along a feed bed to and past a print head of the printing means. In postage meters in which the printing means operates by thermal transfer printing, a pair of input feed rollers feed mail pieces to the print head and a driven impression roller mounted in opposition to the print head presses the mail piece into ink transfer engagement with a thermal transfer ink ribbon and the ink ribbon into heat transfer engagement with a thermal print head. In order to accommodate a cassette containing thermal transfer ribbon, the input rollers are spaced a significant distance from the impression roller in an upstream direction. This spacing of the input rollers from the impression roller is acceptable when printing on mail pieces which are much longer than this spacing of the rollers because the input rollers are able to feed the mail piece until at least the leading edge of the mail piece has been engaged by the impression roller and further feeding of the mail piece past the print head can be effected by the impression roller.
Smartcards may be utilised for input of information and data into postage meters and for example may be used to input data to enable the printing means of the postage meter to print a desired advertising slogon alongside the postal indicium on the mail piece. A desired advertising slogon may be designed on behalf of a postage meter user and data for controlling the printing means of the postage meter to print the desired slogon is written into an electronic memory of the smartcard and the smartcard is then provided to the user of the postage meter. A user of the postage meter may require a number of different advertising slogons for use at different times and hence it is desirable that the smartcards in which the different slogons are recorded may be easily identifiable. For this reason it is desired to print, onto a surface of the smart card, an imprint of the particular advertising slogon for which data is recorded on the smartcard.
It would be convenient to use the printing means of a postage meter to print the imprint of the advertising slogon on the smartcard. However the dimension of the card in a direction in which it is desired to feed the card to and past the print head is less than the spacing of the input rollers from the impression roller. As a consequence if the card is fed into and by the input rollers, the leading edge of the smartcard does not reach the impression roller before the trailing edge of the card leaves the input rollers. Therefore the card is fed by the input rollers and then lies in the space between the input rollers and the impression rollers and is not engaged by the rollers and is not fed past the print head. Accordingly it has not been possible to utilise the printing means of a postage meter to print on relatively short items such as smartcards.